We all know that SharePoint doesn’t supportsaving publishing sites as a template. I don’t recommend doing that anyway as the produced template will have errors and isn’t reliable to be used in production to create new sites off of. However, sometimes as a developer you need to save a publishing site as a template to see how SharePoint packages things. This can help you build your own custom web template which is a neat thing and replaces the need to save a publishing site as template.

Well, since the Save site as a template option is hidden from the publishing sites settings page we all used the following URL to go there directly:

/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx

Or

/_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx

Well, that is not going to work anymore in SharePoint 2013 if your site is a publishing site or have the publishing features activated.

You basically get that following error:

The “Save site as template” action is not supported on this site.

In order to get around this issue you need to update a single property page value in your SPWeb object for the site you are trying to save as a template and you are good to go. The property is called SaveSiteAsTemplateEnabled. We need to set that property to true that’s all.

# Get a reference to the target site

# Update the property bage value and set it to the string value “true”

$web.AllProperties[“SaveSiteAsTemplateEnabled”] = “true”

# Commit the property change to server

$web.Update()

Very simple. Now if you navigate to the Save site as a template page using the URL directly it will show fine and it will allow you to save the site as a template which stores a copy in the Solution gallery of the site collection. Make sure you have enough space in your C drive temp folder because it uses that location as a staging directory.

Here we go, it’s been a long time I didn’t publish an article which consist of hardcore troubleshooting! Yes, you are correct. It took some time to resolve but finally the issue has been resolved. This time it’s regarding problem occurring while ‘save site as template’ and how we found the culprit.

Problem description:-

User has raised the problem ticket by mentioning “facing problem while saving the site as template”, additionally the templates are getting saved in the solution gallery but not able to activate it also.

Error message:-

An unexpected error has occurred.

Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation.

Correlation ID: acd95f50-4049-4625-9682-aa93aded118f

Troubleshooting done:-

Further debugging in the SP ULS logs and we found some strange facts which are based on event receivers- please refer below-